Star Coach is based loosely on Blood Bowl, a tactical, turn-based game of football in a fantasy world of elves, dwarves, and dark things.

Instead of choosing each move of each game, Star Coach challenges you to manage your players and their skills - and most importantly - how they run certain plays.

Once you think you've got your team in order and have some plays that you'd like to stomp your competition with, you send out challenges to other coaches. While bots are available for scrimmaging to test your plays, you'll spend most of your time smashing and getting smashed by other players' teams online.

The challenged coach has an alotted time to accept or reject your challenge. If they accept or the timer runs out, Star Coach simulates a game between your two teams.

Once it's done, you can watch a replay and redeem rewards based on your performance. The rewards include experience to level up your players, added options for your plays, and currency to purchase different players.

While the Beta is quite rough, there's plenty to enjoy here. You'll see alot of players that have hundreds of matches under their belt! It's addictive and challenging. So if you haven't already, give it a shot

1:: Getting Started

You're the coach of a Blood Bowl team!

Choose a team (Humans, Orcs, Dwarves, Wood Elves, Skaven, or Chaos)

Buy your 7 players - Can't go wrong here if you spend as much of your money as you can

Now you've got a team, but trust me, they don't know their heads from a snotling in the ground ... Time to show them the difference!

2:: The Playbook

Click on the Playbook on the left side of the main screen

Now on the left is your roster. Once your players level up, you'll click on their names to choose the new skill that they learned.

On the right you'll see your two categories of Tactics. Possession Tactics are for when your team has the ball and Defensive Tactics are for - well... when the... other team...ya know... has the ball.

3:: Possession Tactics 101

Click on the Possession Tactics button and you'll see a new screen with a formation on the left and a list of tactics.

This screen allows you to click on an offensive tactic and click choose to make it your default tactic.

THE EDIT BUTTON allows you to do much more than rename the tactic or move people around. This is sometimes missed by players giving it a once-over. You don't need to go crazy with it right now, but just know that you can define orders for each player to follow according to certain conditions. If you click a play and then click edit, you can poke around some of the premade tactics and see how the players will behave.

For now, if you're Orcs, Chaos, Dwarves, or Skaven choose a running tactic like TO BE EDITED (I haven't seen any default run only plays)

If you're Humans or Wood Elves choose a passing tactic like Basic Offense or Boar's Snout (important: you must have a player with class 'Catcher' for these to work as designed)

Note: These are general suggestions to get you into the game and see some teeth fly. There's a good amount of variety within each of the teams to the point where each team can employ a pretty wide variety of tactics.

4:: Defensive Tactics 101

See Possession Tactics 101 as they use the same format.

For now, just pick a formation that looks like the coverage you'd like to use. Do you want your team to push up and bash your opponent or hang back and watch for the pass? The default defensive plays run pretty much the way they look.

5:: Challenges (aka Time to Bloody the Pitch)

From the main screen, click on the middle panel title 'Official League'

First things first, THE BLUE BUTTON: If you click on the blue button with your coach name in it, it will highlight you on the list to the left. This is really important.

Next, the list on the left shows teams that are available for you to challenge. This is based on your teams rating/rank.

Find a team and click on it. The right panel will now update for that team. The results tab will show you their most recent matches. The action panel will let you challenge them if they're available.

Click 'challenge'. You can now change your tactics for this match if you don't want to use the tactics you already chose for your standard setup. This can be useful as you face various opponents that employ vastly different tactics.

Once your ready, click 'challenge' again. This submits the challenge to the other player. They can choose to accept or reject your challenge. If they don't choose either option at the end of a 2 hour timer, they automatically accept and your two teams play a match.

Repeat the above process, but this time go to the bottom of the list and choose a player named '[BOT] Cyanide'. That's my grandmother and she loves to stomp noobs. Grandma - I mean - these bots are a great way to test out different tactics because the results won't affect your rating for good or bad. You will receive a win, draw, or loss and your players will receive experience for the match.

6:: Replays

Once the match is resolved, click on your Blue Button again. Under the results tab you can see your score vs your opponent's.

You can also CLICK THE REPLAY BUTTON.

The Replay will load up a visual depiction of the match so you can see what the players did. Slow it down and click back and forth between the plays. It's a bit of a mystery how many plays are in each match but they seem to range from 3 to 7. I suggest using the .50 speed for general viewing and the .25 when you're trying to figure out "What the ogrenuts that guy just did!"

7:: Rewards

After matches are resolved, you'll receive rewards as mentioned previously. To accept these, click the blue button on the challenge screen to go to your Team. On the Action Tab, choose 'Get rewards'

Player experience fills up until they hit a new level. You can then choose a new skill (drag and drop) for that player

Gold Crowns (Gold/Cash) Can be spent in the Bloody Market on additional players

Cyans Can be spent in the Bloody Market on additional players in lieu of paying Gold Crowns. (The cost shown in the Bloody Market is either/or not both.

State of the Coaches Union

This wouldn't be much of an introduction without letting you know that the current state of the game is far from perfect. To be fair, though, sometimes what seem like bugs are actually your players trying to do what you told them to. Check out that tactic and see what you can tweak to correct the mistake.

That said there are bugs and a general lack of polish and features as of right now. Also, the official forums are full of posts about Louis Vuitton outlets and such. Not sure what kind of haxors is up with that, but dig a little into this game and I think you'll be glad you did.

Tip of the Bloody Iceberg!

There's plenty more addictive fun to be had. The default tactics make use of 5 orders to instruct your players. Up to 30 orders can be unlocked, allowing you a ton of opportunity to devise ruthless or trixy plays!

Cyanide has done a fantastic job with the video game adaptation of Blood Bowl, now Blood Bowl: Chaos Edition. There's good reason to expect great things for Star Coach as it gets more attention.

Even in the Beta, there's a wide variety of tweaking you can do to make your team perform vastly different. There's some exposed elements in certain areas of the Beta that indicate there's more to come.

If this is helpful to you

Leave me a positive comment. If there's enough interest, I can go into further detail or create tutorials. I really want to see this game succeed and realize its potential. That said, I need to gauge your interest to see if I should post anything else.

If you're with Cyanide

There's a bit of a community here even in your *ahem* rough Beta phase. Can we hear something from you on a more frequent basis?

Have to mention this: you should've made this guide. I'm happy to help but this is so basic I was shocked at the lack of effort put into introducing new players to your game.

There's plenty more addictive fun to be had. The default tactics make use of 5 orders to instruct your players. Up to 30 orders can be unlocked, allowing you a ton of opportunity to devise ruthless or trixy plays!

You get a total of 37 orders when you max out your Fame. That is in addition to the default orders (ie. BlockBallCarrier). Not nearly enough if you ask me.

There's a gold and fame bug that allows you to max out in a couple of hours. I reported it 1½ months ago and it hasn't been fixed yet. Heck, I'm not even sure the developers are aware of it. Anyway, it's all in the official forum if you want to max out your team *fast*.